Fair Fatigue in Pomona

So here we go again on my annual visit to the LA County Fair. I have to say that this year's trip was pretty ho-hum food-wise. There wasn't really any hot food item of the year, though those items usually a let down anyway.




On the deep fried front, I did check out the newest thing at Chicken Charlie's which was the deep fried Klondike Bar. Unlike some of their past menu items which have been pretty repulsive, the Klondike actually was pretty good. Fried ice cream is, of course, nothing new, so deep frying a chocolate covered ice cream bar is pretty much a no-brainer for a fried food monger like Chicken Charlie. The fried crust gave way to a molten mess of melted ice cream and chocolate, while it retained a small blob of solid ice cream in the middle. Not bad at all.




For the first time I also tried the old MacPherson's ice cream stand in the shopping pavilion. MacPherson's serves soft serve and hand-dipped ice cream bars. We sampled a couple of the bars. The ice cream in the bars is bland and sort of chemical tasting but the hand dipping is fun and the sprinkles topping (as opposed to the nuts shown here) gives a nice sweet crunch. It's sort of repulsive and good at the same time, in a junk foodie type of way. Of course, given that it's served on a stick, the ice cream bar is the perfect food to carry around the shopping pavilion where live people hawk products that I thought only existed on late night infomercials.

There was more to the fair, but not much new or exciting: a mediocre french dip, the lamented loss of my favored fried artichoke stand, the always excellent fried Snickers bar and some pretty decent fried clams served with lackluster french fries at the Fish 'n Chips place.

Another year, another fair; maybe next year they'll cook up something more exciting.


Here are all my previous fair write-ups.